The recent disaster in Myanmar has highlighted how some countries are much more susceptible to the impacts of severe weather events than others. Notably, there is some indication that destruction of coastal mangrove habitat may have contributed to the loss of life and property.

From Greenwire (subscription only)

Surin Pitsuwan, the Association of South-East Asian Nations secretary-general, said coastal developments had diminished mangroves, which act as natural defenses against storms.

A study of the 2004 Asian tsunami found that areas near healthy mangroves suffered less damage and had fewer deaths.

“Encroachment into mangrove forests, which used to serve as a buffer between the rising tide, between big waves and storms and residential areas; all those lands have been destroyed,” Pitsuwan said. “Human beings are now direct victims of such natural forces.”

His comments followed a news conference by Myanmar’s minister for relief and resettlement, who said more deaths were caused from storm surge than by the winds that reached 120 miles per hour (190 kilometers per hour).

A recent U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization assessment found that 8.9 million acres (3.6 million hectares) of mangrove forests had disappeared since 1980.

Mangroves and other coastal wetlands habitats act as a buffer to the powerful waves and storm surges of large hurricanes and cyclones. There is some data to indicate that the level of destruction experienced by New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina was partly due to the long decline in coastal Louisiana wetland habitat.

Just to the West of Myanmar, Bangladesh is expected to to experience some of the worst effects of rising sea levels and increased storm activity. Much of the population of Bangladesh lives in its vast delta, a region that is extremely susceptible to climate change.

So what are the tens of millions of people who live in these rural wetland areas to do? It appears many of them are moving to cities, placing even more pressure on the resources of urban communities.

From The Daily Star

Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU) organised the seminar on ‘Climate change, migration and Bangladesh’ at the RC Majumder Auditorium at Dhaka University.

Dr Ahsanuddin Ahmed, executive director of Centre for Global Change, presented the keynote paper in the seminar.

In his paper, Dr Ahsanuddin said climate change-driven natural disasters are making the livelihoods difficult. So the people are migrating to urban areas.

According to a research, about 50 percent of the total population in Bangladesh would be urban dwellers by 2020, he added.

The temperature in the country will increase by 1.3 degrees centigrade because of climate change, resulting in devastating floods like in 1988, 1998 and 2007. The floods would become more frequent and cause greater devastation, Dr Ahsanuddin warned.

He also urged the policymakers to take into consideration the effects of development projects on the environment before taking up any such projects.

Well, as it turns out, the Nerdy Climate Guys learned today that the State Department issued an internal departmental notice that it is raising prices for food within its cafeteria.  Is this because of the global food price increases?  If so, someone should mention this to the Bureau of Economic, Energy, and Business Affairs, which continues to maintain that global food prices are not primarily caused by subsidies for biofuels.  According to the State Department, only 3 percent of food is due to subsidies, noting that they have mainly affected the price of corn, which is up by 30%.  This misses the point:  Corn is a staple part of feed for livestock, and thus increases in the price of corn contributes substantially to the price of meat products. There is truth that other factors, such as increases in the price of oil which makes the harvesting and delivery of food much more expensive, drought in key producing countries such as Australia (which should be worsened with the recent flooding in the US midwest), and competition with states that are newly emerging on the global markets (China and India), are important contributors to the price of food.  Nonetheless, the subsidies, like any other trade distorting measures, affect markets and prices.

The mission of C₂Si focuses on both conservation and adapting to climate change because these two issues are inextricably linked both scientifically and in terms of humanity’s response. A new article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences highlights just how important this connection is.

Curtis Deutsch, of UCLA, and his colleagues have looked through reams of published studies that investigate how insects living the the tropics may be affected by climate change. Co-lead author Joshua Tewksberry described their conclusions to the NYTimes, “‘The tropical species in our data were mostly thermal specialists, meaning that their current climate is nearly ideal and any temperature increases will spell trouble for them.’”

As ScienceNOW notes, this focus on non-charismatic animals from the tropics (not polar regions) highlights how biodiversity in general is threatened by warming temperatures:

It’s fashionable to fret about how climate change will harm polar bears and penguins. But scientists now predict that, at least among insects, global warming will take its biggest toll in the tropics–home to more than half the world’s species.

Climate change models agree that temperatures will increase more near the poles than near the equator. Where it’s currently chilly, a couple of degrees of initial warming could launch a positive feedback loop: as snow and ice melt, they can’t reflect heat from the earth, which then warms even more. Because tropical warming will be less extreme, scientists sometimes suppose that tropical species will suffer less from climate change.

That’s a bad assumption, says Curtis Deutsch, an oceanographer at the University of California, Los Angeles. He notes that temperatures in the tropics are more stable year round than they are at higher latitudes, so tropical organisms–particularly ectothermic, or “cold-blooded,” ones like insects–are adapted to cope with a narrow range of temperatures. Their greater sensitivity to temperature variation might put them at risk, even with less warming.

The problem is this: as temperatures rise, species who have adapted their reproductive mechanisms to a very specific temperature or climate (as many tropical species have), may see the environment change to a less favorable state, thus reducing their reproductive capacity. And all else being equal, lowered reproduction can mean a march towards extinction.

So how might these species cope? Two options exist in a changing environment: evolve or move. The environment is constantly changing, this is a given in biological studies. As a result species are constantly evolving, at different rates, and constantly changing their ranges. But the rate at which climate change is occurring is predicted to be many times faster, and greater in degree, than most of the environmental changes that species have coped with in the past. As a result, many scientists fear that climate change could lead to severely increased rates of extinction (see, for example, Chapter 4 of the IPCC Working Group II 2007 report).

This problem may be especially acute for species living in the tropics. Deutsch and his colleagues conclude at the end of their paper:

Ultimately, organisms with the greatest risk of species extinction from rapid climate change are those with a low tolerance for warming, limited acclimation ability, and reduced dispersal. Most terrestrial organisms having these characteristics are tropical and many of these organisms are occupying disappearing climate regimes (38). This conclusion is troubling because it places the greatest biological risks of climate change in the tropics where biodiversity is greatest.

Whether species go extinct, adapt (through evolving), or change their geographic ranges, these changes will result in tremendous ecological changes. And as the ecosystems that these species constitute shift and alter, the services that nature provides (from the provisioning of food and other resources to regulating pollution and climate) will also change. This presents a substantial challenge to human communities.

It is critical that we mitigate the causes of climate change through aggressive reduction of greenhouse gases. But it is also critical that we prepare for unexpected changes in our environment and in the services we rely on from the environment. Careful planning, modeling, and active management of these resources will be central to the future of human communities both local and global. This, in a nutshell, is what C₂Si is all about.

Following on the earlier post regarding rising food prices as a result of climate change, the Washington Post has a good article detailing the myriad challenges farmers and planners will face to adapt their agricultural practices, food production systems, and food distribution issues in response to a changing climate.

In a warmer world beset by greater extremes of droughts and floods, farmers will have to change crop management practices, grow tougher plant varieties and be prepared for constant change in the way they operate, scientists say.

The trick for farmers is to adapt, and scientists say the crops of the coming decades will have to be very different.

“We will see a suite of new traits that are integrated into the varieties that are planted in the future,” said Ainsworth.

“This is something we do need to start soon because anything that we hope to develop today probably won’t be in the field until 2018 and the climate then will be very different.”

 On Thursday, the food crisis actually hit home when I opened up the Washington Post, and found the headline lead on the front of the business section, “Citing Supply, Sam’s Club and Costco Limit Sales of Rice“.  Granted, the limitation was for 200 pounds of rice per visit.  I like rice, but not that much.  This report made the Daily Show with John Stewart that night.

Rice, like many other food stocks, is setting records.  On that day, rice hit a record price of $24.85 per 100 pounds on the Chicago Board of Trade, up 70 percent this year.  This increase follows other increases in the price of wheat, corn and soybeans.  A recent World Bank Background Note, Rising Food Prices: Policy Options and World Bank Response, finds that global wheat prices are up 181 percent over the 36 months leading up to February 2008, and the overall global food prices have increased by 83 percent.  An interactive chart from the Financial Times nicely demonstrates the magnitude of the crisis.  These increasing prices have also led to food riots around the world in Bangladesh, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Italy, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Yemen.  The World Food Program has had difficulty in getting enough food for those desparately in need due to high food prices coupled with high fuel prices.  High fuel costs affect the cost of delivering food to people who lack it; such groups are usually located in remote areas.

The increase in prices may mean that more people in poverty.  According to an article by Lee Hudson Teslik on the Council on Foreign Relations website, the food price increases have worked to undo many of the gains on poverty.  For many in the developing world, as much as 70 to 80 percent of their income goes to food prices.  Countries that have traditionally exported food have stopped exporting it to meet demand in local markets which have experience shortages due to profiteering by businesses who were exporting more of their goods to take advantage of high global commodity prices.  Vietnam which had in recent years become the world’s second biggest rice exporter has stopped all exports for the time being.

Generally, a lack of food isn’t usually an issue of not being able to find food as it as not being able to afford it.  So why has the price of food gone up?  Some blame increased bio-fuel production as Western countries push biofuels as a means of diversifying energy sources due to concerns over energy security, oil prices, and climate change.  Bio-fuel production in the United States has been heavily subsidized and protected by high tariffs, which has distorted markets and inefficiently diverted production of wheat, soy, corn, and palm oil away from food production to energy.  However, there have been other factors as well, including a major drought in Australia, increased energy costs (and thus transportation), and fertilizer costs, and a growing thirst in the emerging economies of India and China for meat and dairy products (which requires much more food and water inputs than and equivalent amount of rice or wheat).

Although bio-fuels were developed as a means, in part to address climate change concerns, it may actually worsen them.  According to Bill Laurance of the Smithisonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), soy and palm oil producers have cleared large swaths of forests in South-East Asia and the Amazon for expanding production.  US subsidies and tariffs have also had the effect of distorting global markets resulting in European biodiesel being shipped to the US to be mixed with US regular diesel, and then reexported with a dollar a gallon subsidy to Europe.  Hardly a reduction in emissions.  Increased production also equates with other ecosystem service subsidies that are not included in the cost of production, such as the impact of fertilizer and increased fossil water use on production. 

So, this is a climate blog.  What is the link to climate here?  Well, we can use the current food crisis to better understand and prepare for the potential effects of climate change on variability and disruption of the world food supply.  Any response to climate change by countries must be within the global economic system, rather in spite of it, which means reducing subsidies and tariffs that may distort markets to increase adaptability.  Further, hidden ecosystem services must be expressly accounted for (water, currently a free good that is necessary for food production), particularly as a change in global climate conditions may affect those subsidies, and thus affect the overall price of food.  The drought in Australia provides an example of this.  Much of the Middle East, central Asia, and North Africa will, according to some models, have less precipitation in the future and will be more dependent on food imports.  Increasing climate variability will mean increasing stress on food production.  The Philippines, according to one report, have already seen some effects.  Understanding how global agricultural production will change will be important to estimating new demands and adapting to them.

 A new study in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society by MIT researchers Professor Kerry Emanuel, Prof. Emanuel’s postdoc Ragoth Sundararajan and graduate student John Williams, supports previous research suggesting that global climatic disruption may increase the intensity of storms, even though the number of such storms would decline, although there was some variability from basin to basin. 

This study, based on theoretical climate models that fine-scale global circulation models, follows another study that was released immediately before the Katrina catastrophe based on historical data that had been published in Nature demonstrating a doubling of intensity of Atlantic storms over the last 100 years, and particularly over the last 30 years.  That study looked not only at the energy of a storm when it makes landfall, but over a storm’s lifetime in the ocean.  Although the new study suggested less than a doubling of intensity, it represented a potential explanation and affirmation for the Nature study’s findings. 

This comes on additional revelation in a commentary in Nature that IPCC baseline climate models may be underestimating the extent of the coal-fueled boom in Asian economies, and double-counting the advantages that technology will provide over time to reduce carbon emissions.  The IPCC uses various models depicting different scenarios of future climate change, including reference scenarios that act as baselines for comparisons when estimating the amount of reduction in carbon emissions.  One reference scenario is entitled, “Business as Usual” model and accounts for what will happen to changes in the percentage of atmospheric carbon if we don’t change our current emissions.  The “Business as Usual” model is usually compared with other models - for instance, a model that would have a significant chance of keeping the global mean temperature rise only to 2 C.  What usually happens next is that the 2 C Model’s total carbon emissions are subtracted from the Business as Usual Model projected carbon emissions, and the final figure is an estimate of the global reduction in carbon emissions necessary to limit any temperature increase to 2 C.

So what is the problem?

Implicit within the model is the assumption that economies will steadily increase their energy efficiency and decrease the amount of carbon they emit per unit of energy.  The scenarios don’t specify what technologies will be used to achieve these things, so unwary users may be improperly including efficiency reductions that are already considered within the Business as Usual model.  The result is that the amount of carbon emissions that need to be reduced may be much higher than previously estimated because those technological advances are double counted.

The amount of carbon emissions that are automatically reduced through technological advancement under the models is not insignificant.  In fact, in all of the six reference scenarios in the Nature commentary, the IPCC assumes that between 57% and 96% of the reduction in emissions necessary to achieve stabilization at around 500 parts per million will occur automatically, rather than have to be dealt with through explicit policies.  According to the authors, Roger Pielke jr., Tom Wigley, and Christopher Green, two-thirds or more of all the energy efficiency improvements and decarbonization of energy supply required to stabilize carbon is already built into the reference scenarios.  This is because, as they point out, the IPCC is assuming that the bulk of the challenge reducing future emissions will occur in the absence of climate policies.

A second problem is that developing countries like India and China are going to be much more energy intensive (defined as the primary energy consumption per unit of GDP) as their populations move from the countryside into the cities.  Current estimates China’s carbon-dioxide emissions are increasing at a rate much higher than the scenarios in the IPCC reports (2.6%-4.8%) per year.  However, a study by Maximilian Auffhammera, ,  and Richard T. Carson in the May 2008 issue of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management estimates an increase in carbon dioxide emissions of 11 % during the same time period.  In fact, the amount of China’s projected increase alone over the next few years will be greater than the emissions of Great Britain or Germany.

Part of the problem is political.  China is becoming more decentralized for major economic decisions, and increasingly power is shifting to provincial authorities who have more incentives to increase economic potential, and fewer incentives for environmental protection, invoking Hardin’s classic “Tragedy of the Commons” dilemma. 

The tendency by some poorer provinces was to maximize short-term gains by quickly building inefficient coal-fire plants built on 1950s Soviet models.  Many of these power plants are built to last 40-75 years, meaning that the provinces have locked themselves in these high emission’s trajectories through 2050 and beyond.  Moreover, China may have surpassed the United States this year as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases.  It is not clear whether we may use future technological fixes to scrub carbon dioxide out of these inefficient powerplants except at considerable cost.

This suggests that the United State’s decision to withdraw from Kyoto, which was based in part because China and India were essentially exempt as developing countries from the Kyoto targets, may not have been entirely unreasonable.  It is increasingly clear that China will represent a new international competitor to the United States, both economically and politically, and perhaps militarily.

 The IUCN in March came out with a report on the effects of climate change on indigenous people, which you can find here.  Their conclusions were interesting.  According to the report, most indigenous peoples will suffer inequitably by the effects of climate change, are often socially vulnerable as they lack rights and land tenure, and are dependent on fragile livelihoods.  At the same time, they contend, indigenous people may have a better capacity to adapt to climate change.  In fact, indigenous knowledge may incorporate adaptive strategies that have historically allowed indigenous people to survive on marginal and remote habitats. 

So what is the problem, you may ask?  Is this another environmental report that will fell another Indonesian forest?  The key is that the rapidity and severity of the change may overwhelm indigenous adaptive capacity.  Moreover, indigenous people tend to be concentrated on regions that will be more unevenly hit by climate change, and according to some, already affected by it.  This includes the Amazon, Caribbean, Southern Africa, and southern and western Latin America. 

Interestingly, the arguments made on behalf of indigenous people and the threat of climate change are those that are frequently made about rare species and specialists.  These types of species are exceptionally good at adapting to their environments and surviving within a narrow ecological zone.  However, during periods of dramatic environmental change - and here we speak in an ecological sense, say the effect of a storm that knocks down trees in a tropical forest and opens up a clearing - specialists can be at a disadvantage and may fall into an evolutionary trap. 

An evolutionary trap occurs when a species maintains adaptive characteristics for an old environment or system despite being in a new environment where such a response may be maladaptive, in other words, decreases its reproductive output.  How would this occur?  Organisms often rely on environmental cues to make behavioral and life-history decisions.  However, in environments that have been suddenly altered, formerly reliable cues might no longer be associated with adaptive outcomes.  In such cases, organisms can become ‘trapped’ by their evolutionary responses to the cues and experience reduced survival or reproduction.

How do we link the concept of human adaptation to biological adaptation?  Human adaptation and survival depends upon the species and ecosystems to which they are linked.  If a particular species - for instance a grassland species that provides fodder for the domestic animals of a nomad - fails to adapt to drier conditions, it makes it harder for that human community to adapt as well.  The adaptation of an indigenous culture will depend on how much change the members of that culture can support.  Culture is a product of behavior, and behavior is the cutting edge of adaptation.  Thus, the amount of plasticity in a culture will be product of its history, its economic constraints, and the physical environment.